***NOTE: If you sent us email this week, please send it again. We are just recovering from a week of server migration complicated by a computer virus.***
Copyright(October 25, 2001) We're not lawyers, just producers of content. For us (and most website owners, we think), copyright law is a huge pile of confusion. We're always irritated when someone summarizes our material and passes it off as theirs. We weren't completely sure until recently that this is a copyright violation.

It is.

Even under the fair use provisions, such summaries must be attributed to their source. Under the current copyright law, most things are protected the moment they are written whether or not there is a copyright notice.

Everyone who reads this newsletter should read Brad Templeton's articles on Copyright Myths, Linking Rights, his Introduction to Copyright and his theory of Intellectual Property. Brad is the Chairman of the Board of The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the non-profit most likely to be engaged in the definitions of legal boundaries in cyberspace. He founded the first real online publishing business (Clarinet) and is broadly understood as an expert on these issues. (Obviously, if you have business related legal questions, you'll want to find a lawyer with some experience in the subject rather than introductory articles on the web.)

The essence of copyright law is that copyright belongs to the creator of the material from the moment it is created regardless of the media format.

Our irritations aside, copyright is a huge issue waiting for a chance to explode. While we think that publishers and media companies ought to have a working familiarity with the issues, it appears to be the case that many companies believe that we have some sort of special exemption our industry. While the subject was brought to our attention as a question of market abuse, the implications are much broader.

Times are tough. Strong arm sales tactics are beginning to rear their ugly head as sales performance becomes the real discriminator between having and not having a job. We've heard a number of stories, from a number of sources about a number of companies in the job/resume scraping business that boggle our minds.

Here's the sales pitch:

Hi, I'm the sales rep from xxxxx.com (a company with job scraping technology at its core). You know, we've spidered the jobs from your (pick one: company job board, niche website, professional association). Let me show you how they look in our database (online demo follows).

We will continue to carry these ads in our database. But, unless you pay us $XX per listing, we will not mention your (pick one: company job board, niche website, professional association) in any way. Nor will we forward the results of the ad.

Sounds like serious arm twisting to us.

Three things are certain:

The spidering of jobs (for republishing or redistribution) from websites without permission is a copyright violation. Plain and simple.

The spidering of resumes (for republishing or redistribution) without permission is a copyright violation.

Anyone who engages in these practices has set themselves up for a class action or individual lawsuit.

But, the argument goes, those things are published on the web because the author wanted them to be seen. We're just facilitating the original intent of the creator. Strong arm tactics aside, the copyright laws vest the right to determine distribution with the creator, not an agency acting without permission.

That companies and job seekers, as a class, derive some benefit from spidering and redistribution is beyond doubt. This factor decreases the likelihood that suits will be filed. It doesn't change the fact that the use of content without permission is criminal. Standard damages range from $2,500 to $25,000 per episode. (Imagine insuring a resume database against that kind of liability. $2,500 times 1 Million resumes is quite a pile of money.)

We all have a lot to learn about copyright. We're certain that it is a ticking time bomb beneath our industry. It is most likely to go off under the floors of companies in the Resume/Job Scraping businesses. Although FlipDog, CarerCast, GrassIsGreneer and Wanted Technologies are the most observable players, pretty much everyone has an experiment in the arena.